


My heart is a room of unfortunate things

by CaptainLaserBeam



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Bruce Banner Feels, Developing Relationship, Explosions, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prompt Fic, Science Boyfriends, Science Bros, stark weapons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2017-11-16 00:11:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainLaserBeam/pseuds/CaptainLaserBeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce isn't sure what to think of Tony Stark yet. Despite how much they seem to have in common, he isn't sure how much the billionaire could really understand about his life. <br/>It isn't until he accidentally loses it, in a room full of bombs, that he realizes he's not the only one sporting a bad history with Stark Weapons.<br/>Pre/developing relationship</p>
            </blockquote>





	My heart is a room of unfortunate things

**Author's Note:**

> Filled and expanded for this prompt:  
> Bruce has been hunted for five years with Stark equipment. Stuff that Ross commissioned from Tony himself, that Tony built. But he really can't help the screaming fear that comes from unexpectedly being shoved in a room full of Stark weapons. The big guy comes out to smash it all, and there will be manly tears and terrified confessions.  
> Because Tony can remember what it's like, every time he sees the glowing coals, the desert heat-  
> They're just two little tortured souls.

There were a thousand reasons that Bruce could come up with for not wanting to be where he was.

More than a thousand. Incalculable. Each ending with the explicit reasoning that he couldn't even remember what it was like to stay in the same place longer than two weeks at a time, let alone be recognized there. Running was all he knew anymore, and it was a foundation that had been built beneath layers of reasoning, denial and acceptance to the life he would undoubtedly lead.

So when SHIELD had yanked him out of that life, that _understanding_ of himself, he was hardly prepared for the reasons. And not just that, but more than anyone else that had been coerced into 'saving the world', Bruce of all people knew that eventually there would come an _after_. When the battle was won...or lost...and the fight was gone. When the scientist wasn't needed. When the monster was more s danger than an asset.

Bruce knew what it looked like when the calm came and the adrenaline was gone.  
The odds were stacked against him, and he knew it from the start.

Still, it wasn't in Bruce's nature to _not_ help, so he had come, and he had offered what he could. And the cost had been a healthy price to both his pride and his sanity. Another chip off, another nightmare lived within the hazy hours of 'The Other Guy's' maniacal manner of thinking. It was all added to the growing list and stored away in Bruce's mind. To either be dealt with later, or not at all if he could help it. But still it remained, like a bad acid trip that left rubble and bodies after the confusion cleared.

His hands would always be red. No matter what size or color they were, he was stained.

It had therefore come to a slow and interesting realization that he wasn't the only person in their power-fueled, angry little group that had the same hands. Sure, the demi-god had seen his fair share, and the Captain out of time had been elbow deep in World War 2 when he'd froze, along with the two foot-soldiers that worked diligently for SHIELD. But none were as helplessly human as he felt, as aimlessly lost and conflicted as he, than Tony Stark.

It hadn't seemed likely from the outside, where the world viewed the loud and obnoxious playboy as nothing but exactly that. He hadn't been to war, or been a soldier by any means, and he easily flounced that he was smarter than god and actually had the know-how to back that up. Bruce had been intimidated at first (by everything, really), but it wasn't long before he started to notice the cracks. The flaws. The stained hands. 

Tony Stark was a genius who had become a monster with the best of intentions in mind. He worked himself to the edge of sanity to both run from who he had been and account for who he would be now. His greatest enemy was himself...and wasn't that all just achingly familiar.

Everyone knew the story; knew of the billionaire hostage held in a cave in the desert until he broke himself free. Escaped home only to don the metal uniform of a warrior that would no longer provide weapons nor bow to corporate submission.

But no one knew the details. Not really. Tony had been kind enough to grant Bruce his own space, the very necessary breathing room that Bruce needed in order to function, lest he hastily plot himself a quick escape as soon as humanly possible. Thankfully, Tony, who was no longer allowing 'Mr. Stark', had seemed to know just what he'd needed, and that included being acknowledged for what he was. So many ignored it, skirting around Bruce and avoiding the topic where they felt it uncomfortable to address. Treating him politely, but keeping their distance. Letting him get away with calling his condition 'The Other Guy', and accepting his avoidance. It was where he was safe in his denial. It was what he wanted, but not what he needed.

“Hey Jekyll, you wanna toss that stylus sitting in front of you over in this direction?”

Bruce blinked, his glasses sliding down his nose before he turned from his microscope. “Who, me?”

“Oh no, absolutely not. The large green man behind you who couldn't pick up a chair, let alone a stylus without breaking it. Yes you, genius. Gimme.”

Bruce couldn't stop the small smirk, even if he'd wanted to. He'd tossed Tony the pen, and somehow the air seemed just a touch less awkward than before. Something Bruce tended to notice more and more as time shared between them continued. As whatever he needed to know about Tony Stark, was provided to him whether he wanted it or not.

Tony loved to talk. Or he just...couldn't help or stop it. He could yabber on for hours about absolutely nothing, or say in a few seconds something that explained so much more than what the television described. And Bruce? Well, Bruce loved to listen. Or just didn't really get a word in edgewise, either way, he heard more than he spoke at most times. It was something Tony either knew, or didn't seem to notice/care, as he always seemed to be answering his own questions. Even when they debated on theory or function or the correct orientation of a chemical element being used to reproduce its own energy.

Tony had father issues, but everyone knew that in some form or another. What they _didn't_ know, was just how badly that had weighed on him for most of his life. Not only that, but it had been the driving force of what had pulled him into his father's company in the first place. Guilt was something Bruce was all too familiar with.

Tony was an alcoholic. It was how he coped with both the nightmares and the memories of things both good and bad. It was his escape, whenever he wasn't in the Iron Man suit or given orders that he could blatantly stick the middle finger to before following them anyway. He drank til he didn't care.

Tony had PTSD. Which shouldn't have been as surprising to Bruce as it first had been, considering the things that he _did_ know. After Tony had made unfortunate friends with a shrapnel filled missile that had his own name on it, Bruce doubted that the facilities that he'd been exposed to had been all that considerate when it came to his surgery. The glowing disc in his chest had started its life in a cave in the middle of a barren desert, hooked to a car battery from what he took from Tony's rambling on the subject. Had they used any kind of anesthetic? How clean were the instruments used? Had he fought infection, after wards? Illness from blood poisoning? From blood loss, even? Given any kind of painkillers to cope? How about the skin around the applicant? How had his body adjusted? 

And then, not to mention the small hints he'd include that there had been torture after he'd healed. Bruce never asked what kind.

It was everything Tony wasn't saying that led Bruce to the correct assumptions that Tony wasn't all that proud of the man he'd become. Not because he was a billionaire son of a billionaire, or that he'd gotten there piggy backing off his family's success that war profiteering had provided. No, Tony disliked himself because he no longer had anything to prove to anyone that wasn't already expected of him. 

As much as being homeless and alarmingly poor had seemed terrifying at times, with it Bruce had also been granted the luxury of being able to run where he pleased. No one knew his face or his name, at least, no one in the same hemisphere, and although he'd have given anything to be home, and for everything to be normal again, the places he went to were his shield. His cover. Places that needed him, that were grateful of his skills and his desire to help.

No one but a select few knew that Bruce was atoning. _Everyone_ knew that Tony was.

Bruce jumped every time Tony walked by him and prodded him with that stupid pen, an annoying yet somehow friendly habit of reminding him that he was still there. It was never enough to test his limits, not by a long shot, but Tony always seemed to know when Bruce was thinking too hard. When they both needed to just breathe. He wondered if anyone ever did that for Tony, when they could tell he needed a break from everything. Bruce swore to himself he'd start paying better attention.

It wasn't until a month after the Loki incident that things slid abhorrently downhill, and not with any kind of warning or expectation. Bruce knew the time would come when he'd reach his limit, but where that line was came as something of a surprise.

“Dr. Banner, could you come with me a minute? I need your help identifying something.”

Famous last words, but they were asked innocently and with the best intentions by a faceless SHIELD agent that didn't really know any better. None of them could have known, not really. Bruce hadn't even caught his name, and he'd been alone at the time in the lab he shared with Tony, so there was no one else to ask.

He'd followed without question, without concern aside from that need to assist and be useful in any way he could... until the door had opened, closed, sealed... and he'd been subjected to the contents that would unfortunately be everything he'd been avoiding for _years_. Without even realizing.

After wards, when he could think clearly again, Bruce honestly couldn't recall what the boy had asked him for. Whether it had been to help him move something, or answer a question that only a scientist would know, Bruce wasn't really sure. But what he did know, was that the moment the lights came on and that echoing click of the steel enforced door locked itself into place...Bruce saw nothing but green.

It was the largest room he'd ever seen in the Stark tower. And not only that, but one that was filled from foot level to ceiling with Stark labeled, pre-packaged and ready to be detonated bombs, missiles and otherwise unknown lethal creations ready to destroy life in the fastest way possible. Ideally, World War III in four walls a floor and a ceiling.

The door clicked, and Bruce's logical brain accepted the information that it wasn't definite. That the door would open and he could step out if he needed to. But it wasn't fast enough, and before anything could even begin to disseminate in his brain as reasoning, the panic flared from his head to his heart like nothing he'd felt in a very long time.

The logo, the bombs, the weaponry, the guns...firing, blasting, shooting, pain, pain, PAIN. Everything in this room had tried to kill him at some point or another, most more than once and some even specifically for that purpose. Bruce's clear mind didn't remember it, but The Other Guy's did and the memories were so pungent and terrifying that Bruce couldn't speak or move or even breathe as it soaked into his skin like a poison.

And just as poisons do, it spread. Quickly.

Rage was easy. It had became something that Bruce could identify and associate with along with the anger that fueled the fire of rage and made him what he was today. Made it all manageable. He knew what to do with rage. But outright _fear_ and _panic_ that was so haltingly crippling that all you could do was remove the source before you could breathe clearly again? Bruce had no contingency for that.

There was a roar in his ears, screaming, alarms and the feeling of painful transformations that he would never get used to. _Bruce_ was slipping behind a curtain, and _Monster_ had taken control. There was nothing he could do, and this room was not a place where a loose canon should EVER be.

The last thing Bruce saw just as the first box of Stark weaponry was shoved into the nearest wall, was the blood-drained look of horror on Tony Stark's face from the open doorway.

*

When Bruce opened his eyes again, he really, _really_ wished he hadn't.

It wasn't just the view that was terrifying, but the _feeling_ and the knowledge that yet again he woke up knowing just what had happened to him, but not what he'd done. When The Other Guy was angry, Bruce could fight his way forward, force himself to be involved and aware. But when it was panic, or fear, or crippling anxiety even...there was nothing. Bound, gagged and blinded.

So opening his eyes to stark white walls that seared his retinas in their brightness, along with the mass of a very large, serious looking demi-god, was not how Bruce hoped to return to consciousness.

Not that he'd wanted to return at all. But he already knew his options there.

And waking up naked in a crater wasn't high up on that list either.

Bruce was strapped to a bed, that much was clear, but considering the fact that he was nauseated, dizzy and about as strong as a newborn kitten standing under the guard of the Hammer of Thor...going anywhere was pretty much negligible. He tried to choke out a few words, but his throat was on fire and it resulted in nothing more than a coughing fit that sent his chest into painful spasms. This was worse than the other times, he could feel it, and that knowledge terrified him enough that he fought with whatever strength he had to bring himself back to awareness. Bruce needed to know.

Thor came into focus, finally, with his large, inhuman arms crossed over a metal plated chest and his hammer hanging loosely from the fingers of one hand. He was staring down at Bruce with concerned interest, but that wasn't to say he wasn't calculating the next move. Bruce knew why he was there, and why there didn't seem to be a door on any of the white walls around him, but that didn't scare him nearly as much as what he couldn't see.

He tried to speak again, it didn't end well as Bruce fought to breathe and for the first time he could actually hear the heart monitor beeping steadily beside him. He was on watch, that much was obvious, but the details were hazy and the memories...Bruce blinked the sting from his eyes, trying to ignore the slight up-speed beep of the monitor as it came rushing back.

The demi-god was babysitting because he'd hulked out without control. In a room full of explosives. With civilians.

Bruce felt light headed and exhausted, but he didn't want to sleep any longer. Hell, he didn't want to really be aware any longer since it wasn't all that fair that he would always be forced to bear the weight of the actions of a creature that took no responsibility for any of it. Had he killed anyone? Were they even in the same building anymore or had the entire place gone up in flames because of him? How about the buildings next to it? The _city_ for fuck's sake...there'd been enough bombs in that room to take out a small country.

And Tony...his comrade...his friend?...The only person other than Betty that had ever seemed to understand....had he killed him too?

A bullet through the tonsils didn't seem cruel enough anymore. Bruce reached a shaky hand towards Thor, motioning vaguely to his hammer before his wrist was stopped by the steel enforced chains. They should have killed him while they'd had the chance. He tried to say a name in question, the only name he was concerned for, but not even he could tell what the word sounded like.

Thor didn't say anything as Bruce choked on his own lethargy, his sharp eyes glancing from the thin, weakened man-creature strapped to the bed, to the heart monitor beside him. Bruce couldn't even begin to imagine what he could be thinking, but he seemed to come to a decision before he suddenly turned and wordlessly stepped away from the bed. The wall opened in front of him from a seamless door, allowing the demi-god to duck through the exit before it closed again in a whoosh of air. 

Bruce was left in horrible unanswered silence, and his eyes slipped shut on their own.

When light and sound came back to him again, the view had changed. He was still in a bed, though a far less criminal one, propped at an angle without straps or chains or anything but a blanket holding him down. The walls were a muted white this time, with both a window and a door on either side of him. He had some of his strength back, but still felt like he'd been tossed into the heart of a supernova shaped like a pinball machine. He couldn't recall the last time he'd felt this drained after transforming, which meant...

“You're in the same building you've always been.”

Bruce jumped, as he always did when Tony took him by surprise. And wasn't that just the best feeling, coming down from the harsh reality that he might have to accept killing someone else he considered friend. There he sat beside the bed, bruised, slashed and one arm in a sling, but otherwise alive. Bruce felt his chest shudder; he opened his mouth to speak and ask everything he wanted to ask, but the words wouldn't come. He coughed again, instead, breathing harshly as his frail, very _human_ body recuperated from the onslaught. It was horrible, especially since he knew no amount of pounding would ever really kill him.

Tony had a glass of water in front of him before he could even finish his thoughts, and Bruce took it gratefully with shaking hands.

“The building is fine, no one was killed, and aside from the loss of a whole stinking lot of Stark Military arms that SHIELD had annoyingly been collecting...there was no loss to anyone.” Tony spoke softly, uncharacteristically even, and Bruce noticed that his hand never left the support of the glass as he shakily sipped from it.

Bruce cleared his throat, letting himself relax, somehow knowing that Tony wouldn't lie to him.  
“How?” He asked quietly, tired eyes catching bruised ones.

There was a smirk, a trademarked one actually, as amusement seemed to fill Tony's face. It was unexpected, considering the circumstances.

“Me, actually. Well...I get the credit for squealing, and if not for that, there's no way in hell that our Techno Viking would have known to get his ass to that room to contain it. Not to mention that I had JARVIS set off the fail-safes to seal the room and evacuate the surrounding floors, just in case. The walls of that room were made of stronger stuff than my suit, otherwise there's no damn way I would have let Fury store that shit in there.”

Bruce listened, as he always did, assimilating the information and hearing the words between the lines even as he was reassured in Tony's usual style of flippancy. No one was killed...though some were hurt...and the room was self sealed. The only one that stayed in it were Thor, and...

“But...there was no way to get you out of there until your angry alter ego got it outta his system.”

Tony always seemed to know, somehow. Even when Bruce said nothing at all, he knew what was important, and how it all worked. The monster within, and the frail human encasing it. It was the reason that he felt so horrible and weak right now, more so than usual. The Other Guy had been trapped in a mine field of various, horrible weaponry that did nothing but continue to explode in his face with the force of a military fleet. It really was a wonder he was still alive after that.

“It's...it's okay.” Bruce said, letting Tony take the glass from him. “Thanks...I'd rather it was me in there than...”

“Actually, _I_ should be thanking _you_. And apologizing. If I did either of those things all that often, that is. Then I should. Would.”

Bruce blinked, reorganizing that sentence the best he could.

“I...what?”

“That room was never supposed to exist for more than a week or two. No, seriously, I wasn't having it. If there had been anywhere else I trusted to contain such a vast amount of...really bad shit...it would have been there instead. But, well, there wasn't. It was all to be destroyed anyway, so you sped up the job for me. Cheers.”

This was all spoken quickly, in Tony's usual, whipping style of run-on sentence, but Bruce was sure he was missing something. Wasn't this where Tony was now Mr. Stark who got angry about his stuff being messed with and kicked him out? Which was putting the situation mildly, really. 

He took a quick glance towards the window, noting how high up they were and what part of the city it was facing. He could get out of this building easily enough, although getting past SHIELD was going to be a pain, so he'd have to wait until he was back to full strength...then to get out of the country, away from things like friends and comrades and people he could hurt...

“Hey, Rainman, focus here. I'm pouring my heart out and telling you that you did me a favor and you're doing nothing but being wistful and planning your next vacation. Honestly, I-”

“Why would you thank me for that?” Bruce interrupted, and it took Tony by surprise, he could tell, as the man paused. The first slip of that mask where all those cracks and shards could be seen. It explained so much, yet nothing at all before it slipped back into place. Effortlessly.

“I told you, that room was never supposed to-”

“I heard you. But that could have...that could have been so much worse. I assume he destroyed it all? Possibly left a few craters before the smoke settled? Screw structural damage, what about _people_? Look at you, you're-”

“Dashing, I know.” Tony jumped in, alerting Bruce that his heart had sped up just a bit and he fell silent. Tony, however, continued. “And if you'd listen to anything I said, you'd have heard that nothing of value was lost. The crap in that room wasn't just being stored there for the sake of storing. It was all going to its death. Destruction. Elimination, if you will. You just sped up the process.”

Bruce licked his dry lips, letting his mind sort and resort and organize just what Tony was trying to tell him. There was no malice, no hurt or betrayal in that face. Just the slightest hint of...understanding? After a moment, he took a breath, clearing his throat as Tony reached for the glass again.

“Why would you-”

“The same reason you hulked out, buddy. Same damn reason.”

And then it clicked, as Tony helped Bruce drink more of the precious coolant on his throat and his hands finally began to regain a bit of control. Bruce's mind slid the last piece into place, and he remembered that look on his friend's face, right before he'd blacked out. That horror, that terror that had left little to no blood in the cast iron steel that was Tony Stark...it hadn't been from seeing Bruce go crazy. Unlike probably anyone else watching, Tony's fear wasn't from knowing that a bull had just been let loose in a china shop.

It was because Tony was in that room too, watching Bruce get trapped there. With weapons with his name on it. The enemy; himself.

There was a silent understanding after that, and when Tony moved the glass away, Bruce caught his hand carefully, giving him the first smile he could and nodding in understanding. Tony grinned, that cocky casual slip of nonchalance that told the rest of the world that nothing could ever shake him. Hell or high water, Tony was a solid, unshakable force that would neither be stamped down or extinguished.

But every so often, when no one else was paying attention, if a small breeze came from _just_ the right direction, then that bright flame would waver. Dangerously. And despite everything that was screaming at him to run and atone for what he'd done, Bruce swore to himself that from now on, he would always be there to protect it.

*fin*


End file.
